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Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson, the award-winning author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, began circling around artificial intelligence after reading Ray Kurzweil鈥檚 The Singularity is Near. Since then, the science and technologies of AI have informed her fiction, including her 2019 novel Frankissstein.

12 Bytes is Winterson鈥檚 first non-fiction book about AI. With 12 essays, or 鈥渂ytes鈥�, that together form an unusual and entertaining read, the book is inflected with the same delightful, dry humour as the rest of her work.

In each essay, Winterson holds AI up to the light, contemplating it from different angles. One of the most thought-provoking (and smile-inducing) of the resulting refractions is her treatment of spirituality. By comparing Gnostic aeons (similar to angels) to quantum bits, god to a 3D printer and heaven to mind-uploading, she suggests that AI has been born out of the human quest for meaning 鈥� a quest, she argues, that has been turned into a male pursuit.

Although Winterson stresses that it is 鈥渘ot a history of AI鈥�, 12 Bytes traces the historical and contemporary women who have been written out of the record of computing鈥檚 past and AI鈥檚 future. From Ada Lovelace鈥檚 struggles against 19th-century oppression to the way the crucial roles of Katherine Johnson and other African American women at NASA during the space race were largely unknown before the book and movie Hidden Figures, Winterson emphasises their importance.

Not enough has changed. She lambasts a male technician at Google who belittled women鈥檚 abilities in company-wide emails, and a physicist who lectured on why women aren鈥檛 really suited to physics at CERN, claiming these events aren鈥檛 anomalies but indicative of the systemic biases explaining the lack of female CEOs, STEM workers and students. But why is this binary, built out of stereotypes, perpetuated?

Winterson doesn鈥檛 shy away from all this, but is refreshingly measured and optimistic. AI, she thinks, provides an opportunity for rectifying the situation. It isn鈥檛 human and has neither gender nor ethnicity. 鈥樷�滳omputers are not binary but they use binary,鈥� she writes. AI might teach us to be less binary, even about intelligence.

鈥淲e have our own intelligence, plus that ofAI, but we are nowhere close to solving human issues鈥�

And what exactly do we mean by the 鈥淚鈥� in 鈥淎I鈥�, she asks. Our definition is based on Descartes鈥檚 dualism, which she says 鈥渃onfused consciousness with rational, deductive, problem-solving thinking of the kind (sometimes) displayed by humans. In his view, by male humans鈥�.

On this front, AI has already beaten us: it 鈥渢hinks鈥� faster than we do, with top-end laptops managing 100 billion instructions per second. We have our own intelligence, plus that of AI, but we are nowhere close to solving human issues like gender and racial equality or the climate crisis, says Winterson. She concludes that we don鈥檛 have a non-binary definition of intelligence, encompassing emotional intelligence and love. If only Descartes had also written 鈥淚 love, therefore I am鈥�, she writes.

12 Bytes is such a welcome break from the scaremongering that accompanies non-specialist surveys of AI that it is easy to get swept away by the author鈥檚 impassioned storytelling.

While Winterson is positive that we will learn from AI, she is clear that it is the same sort of people (white men, statistically speaking) who do its programming and designing. Aside from increasing diversity in the workplace, which is only happening slowly, she doesn鈥檛 settle on how AI can avoid reflecting the biases of its creators.

With its imaginative, insightful and wide-ranging essays, 12 Bytes will undoubtedly prompt readers to begin their own circlings around AI. Less certain is whether it will propel us out of an infinite, theoretical orbit and inspire a course of action on AI鈥檚 issues.